Past exhibitions

Inhale / Inhabit

a performance by Jonathan Baldock and Florence Peake
March 8, 2017

On the occasion of Conversation Piece | Part 3, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, the artist Jonathan Baldock presents a performance entitled Inhale/ Inhabit, that will be held on Wednesday, March 8 at 7pm and 8pm, in collaboration with Florence Peake, visual artist, dancer and choreographer.

Jonathan Baldock’s multidisciplinary practice uses painting, sculpture, performance and evocative installations finding inspiration in the magical worlds of mythology, masks, tribal rituals and folkloristic traditions. In all his works, the artistseems to recall classical motifs of the past, contaminated by particular disturbing elements, that are able to transform the figure into uncanny artefacts that remind us of distant cultures.

The performance, focuses on the threshold and tension between objects and the moving body, by inhabiting and charging the spaces between works to form a liminal encounter. Peake embodies an imagined mythological character born from a cosmic oral portal to manipulate time, creating an archaic feeling of suspense and sensuality. Through ritualised tasks connected to the wallhangings and sculptures thus forming new abstract narratives to propose moments of refuge.

The scenario of the performance would be the project that Baldock realized on the occasion of Conversation Piece | Part 3, where the artist decided to focus on transforming elements of the human body into objects, leaving out the symbolic dimension of the fragmented body in the era of objectification. The eyes and mouth are metaphorical doors capable of communicating with the inner parts of the body to the outside world, these being the main channels through which man feeds his mind and his body, but something dramatically appears and, as in a fairy tale, a forest of branches grows around the works preventing these vital organs to properly perform their functions.

Florence Peake is a London-based artist and choreographer. With extensive training in dance and a background in painting, her performance practice combines a variety of media—from drawing to sculpture—in relation to the moving body. Site and audience, live and recorded text, wit and humour are key to her work. Her interdisciplinary projects, made both independently and collaboratively, have been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally since 1995 in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Prague, Sweden and Latvia. Peake’s work has also been commissioned and shown at prestigious venues such as the National Portrait Gallery (2008), National Review of Live Art (2009), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2013) and Hayward Gallery (2014).